It is, in fact, this possession of a common scheme of use and wont, and a consequent common outlook and manner of thinking, that constitutes the most intrinsic bond of solidarity in any nationality, and that finally marks it off from any other.
It is equally a matter of course that any other given community, living under the rule of a substantially different, or divergent, system of institutions, will be exposed to a course of workday discipline running to a different, perhaps divergent, effect; and that this other community will accordingly come in for a characteristically different discipline and fall under the rule of a different commonsense outlook.

Where an institutional difference of this kind is somewhat large and consistent, so as to amount in effect to a discrepancy, as may fairly be said of the difference between Imperial Germany and its like on the one hand, and the English-speaking nations on the other hand, there the difference in everyday conceptions may readily make the two peoples mutually unintelligible to one another, on those points of institutional principle that are involved in the discrepancy.

This is the state of the case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have arrayed them.

And the many vivid expressions of consternation, abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error, bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint which these German preconceptions and their logic exercise over the Intellectuals, no less than over the populace.
Conversely, of course, it is nearly as impracticable for those who have grown up under the discipline of democratic institutions to comprehend the habitual outlook of the commonplace German patriot on national interests and aims; not quite, perhaps, because the discipline of use and wont and indoctrination is neither so rigorous nor so consistent in their case.

But there is, after all, prevalent among them a sufficiently evident logical inability to understand and appreciate the paramount need of national, that is to say dynastic, ascendancy that actuates all German patriots; just as these same patriots are similarly unable to consider national interests in any other light than that of dynastic ascendancy.
Going simply on the face value of the available evidence, any outsider might easily fall into the error of believing that when the great adventure of the war opened up before them, as well as when presently the shock of baffled endeavour brought home its exasperating futility, the Intellectuals of the Fatherland distinguished themselves above all other classes and conditions of men in the exuberance of their patriotic abandon.